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US Treasury to Post Previously Private Email Addresses Online
An anonymous reader writes "After receiving around 10 thousand comments about a government proceeding and after promising not to reveal personal info from those comments online, the US Treasury department decided to post email addresses of those who commented online. Sounds like they don't want any more comments about government proceedings. The email harvesters are going to have a great time."
maybe it's just that the department of treasury figures that spammers support the industry more than they do harm to it. Thus they decided to support the spammers.
But the public can not find out about the VP's secret energy taskforce.
Sad.
Usual disclaimers apply (IANAL), but when you decide to post on a public website under the auspices of privacy, you have a right to expect that their end of the bargain will be held up, no? Couldn't it be viewed that the privacy statement was a sort agreement between the department and the poster? Now that the department has broken its promise, is there any form of redress a person can seek?
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska
in fear of flame from regex super gods, i won't dare post my regex example here... but really, could it be that hard to remove something@place.com ???
Here's a consumer alert from the Federal Trade Commission on why you shouldn't post your email address online... how ironic!
Also ironic: the FTC posts their own email address online (uce@ftc.gov) at the bottom of their webpage!
You can actually do this and live quite well.
Direct deposit + a Visa check card means you can live quite nicely without handling any physical money (or even checks) at all. Heck, don't most Slashdotters live that way already?
BTW, more money is out there in non-physical form than there is physical money.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
So you prefer to let them fuck you over?
No, they won't be fucking you over if you don't fuck with them first. Keep a low profile; be nearly invisible.
That is despicable, all the more so because the article makes it sound as if this is a technical issue, not a privacy issue for them, there are so many posts that they can't keep up with stripping out personal information.
The (soon to be) American way.
they said "all", and you said "many".
Perhaps this is the problem. They could only remove many when the goal was all.
Have a look at the front page of ftc.gov
If you highlight the section just below Last Updated: Thursday, January 8, 2004 10:05 AM you'll see two "hidden" email addresses (font color set to white.)
Anyone know what this is about? Spam trap?
Look, it was crappy that they went back on their word but this isn't the beginning of some totalitarian state. The TTB normally receives around 20 comments for something like this and this time they received close to 15,000. They got slahdoted.
The TTB announced their plans to publish the full content of the emails and letters on Dec 2, 2003. They gave everyone who contacted them a way to prevent their addresses from being published. Granted, not many people read the Federal register but given the budgetary constraints that the TTB has this was the best way.
Also, everyone is assuming that it is the emails that are the problem. TTB also received 4,800 letters and faxes. Normally they receive about 20 comments. It's really easy to redact information from 20 comments but 4,800 letters, that will take a lot of time and manpower. Taking the info out of the emails requires a technical know-out that maybe out of reach of the person who's main job is dealing with 20 comments at a time. Is the TTB supposed to put out bids for a contractor to come in a write a Perl script to do a job that a person normally does in two minutes with a marker and hitting a few control x's? Is it worth the delay in the public posting the comments?You assume the dictator is the same person as the chief. Consider how long some of the current administration heads have been working in the government. My favorite example is Jack Valenti. He gets onto the radar of these young nerds because of recent dealings in the entertainment industry. But how many realize that he'd occupied a position of authority for 4 decades? How many know he was in the JFK motorcade?
Consider Ashcroft's career. Did you vote for Ashcroft? He had power 8 years ago, and he will probably still have power 8 years hence, even though Mr. Bush will be quietly enjoying his retirement.
How about Rumsfeld? He didn't just fall off a turnip truck in 2000 either -- he's been pulling strings in Washington DC since the Eisenhower administration! Did you vote for Rumsfeld? Why didn't he disappear after 8 years in the executive team?
The people fucking up the State are NOT elected, and they do NOT have finite limits on how long they can stay in power. Some of the most important people making some of the most significant decisions in the history of the country, weren't even elected by the people.
Too bad the misdirection works so well, making everybody point their blame the temp worker who occupies the hot seat while the real power people stay under the radar for decades.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
If this is done, why not show the people at the treasury WHY it's a bad idea through a little.. Uh. Kinesthetic Learning Excersise.
Why get the personal names, email addresses, and street addresses of those who made the decision and share the love? Wasn't this sort of thing done with a certain spammer in Michigan?
You could start with Treasury Secretary John Snow...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Any entity within the US borders that publicly discloses an agreement, then violates that agreement after the other party has fullfilled its part of the agreement, gives the violated party and each individual involved, the legal recourse to seek DAMAGES, and remedy via punitive fines.
FTC is inviting multiple LAWSUITS, if not a huge class action suit.
The public party and each member involved should have a lawyer contact the FTC legal dept about the address to send the lawsuits too....
karma, hah...
We had 2 councilmembers turned out in the last election because of illegal contacts with lobbyists.
This is no different. And the fact is- Cheney was asking the thieves who ripped off California, Oregon and Washington on how to handle the crises they manufactured. Their response was predictable: pollute and drill more.
Man I hope W time in office expires before the statute of limitations. Kenny-boy? Meet RICO. Then meet your cell-mate Bubba.
...they're all Democrats! ;-)
If you run the mail server for your domain, then practically any SMTP server can perform this service using what are called "aliases". Personnaly, I run my own domain at home and use the open source SMTP server "postfix" running on RedHat 8.0 to handle the sending and receiving of email. The way it works in postfix is you edit the alias file, adding an entry for the throw-away email address followed by the real email address to deliver the email to. After you are done editiing the file, you run the postalias command to update the aliases database ( postfix read the alias.db file and not the text alias file when making email delivery decisions ). After that is done ( takes 2 seconds for me ), any email send to the throw-away address will be forwarded to the real mailbox you specified.
For people/businesses I work with often, I pretty much keep the alias I gave them on file unless they abuse it ( like sell it or spam it ). Otherwise, will just delete the alias after I am done with it, and then update the database.
Postfix itself has a nice set of anti-spam tools to restrict who it will receive email from and also who it will forward email for. Again, I restrict sending to computers on my home network by IP/Hostname/From/To addresses and it works very well.
Sorry for the long post, but I figure too much information is better than not enough. So I hope this answered your question.
I can't afford a sig!